This is a poem perhaps, somewhat, in the same mood,
called "Drawings by Children."
And it is based on drawings my own children did
when they were very young, sort of around age of five I would
say, and which are typical of the drawings
of all children that age.
"One.
The sun may be visible or not.
It may be behind you, the viewer of these pictures.
But the sky is always blue if it is day.
If not, the stars come almost within your grasp.
Crooked, they reach out to you, on the verge of falling.
It is never a sunrise or sunset.
There is no bloody eye spying on you across the horizon.
It is clearly day or night, it is bright or totally dark,
it is here and never there.
Two.
In the beginning, you only needed
your head, a moon swimming in space, and four bare branches.
And when your body was added, it was light and thin
at first, not yet the dark chapel from which, later, you
tried to escape.
You lived in a non-Newtonian world,
your arms grew up from your shoulders,
your feet did not touch the ground,
your hair was streaming, you were still flying.
And three.
The house is smaller than you remembered,
it has windows but no door.
A chimney sits on the gable roof, a curl of smoke
reassures you.
But the house has only two dimensions,
like a mask without its face.
The people who live there stand outside as
though time were always summer.
There is nothing behind the wall except a space where the wind
whistles, but you cannot see that."